Almanah 0.5.0

Main window of Almanah 0.5.0.

It seems to be release week for me. Here's Almanah Diary 0.5.0. Of note with this release is the support for text formatting (bold, italic and underline — nothing particularly fancy), persistent window dimensions, the ability to set the encryption key, and better recovery from database corruption/errors (although it's still not perfect).

Packagers should note that the GTK+ dependency has been bumped from 2.12 to 2.14, and the GConf dependency is no longer optional — though the GtkSpell dependency now is (as spell checking support is now optional).

I've now also completed the application name migration to "Almanah Diary", and as such, the source is now at http://svn.gnome.org/svn/almanah/, and localisation statistics are at http://l10n.gnome.org/module/almanah/.

Plans for future versions include:

  • Proper accessibility support
  • Automatic link types (yes, this is a stupid name), so that (for example) past Evolution appointments would be shown for each day
  • Documentation
  • Export to blog, text file, HTML, etc.
  • Undo/Redo support

The first three are what I'd like to definitely get done for 0.6.0, but before I can do that I need to sort out the naming for "links" and "automatic links". Obviously these are rubbish names, especially considering one can currently add a "note link". I had considered "attachments", but that's not much better. Does anyone have any ideas?

7 thoughts on “Almanah 0.5.0

  1. Neil Williams

    To my surprise, clicking on the link in your blog post led to a download, instead of the homepage. I took a look and a few problems appear from the start - files like ChangeLog should not be executable, nor Makefile.am or README. Other files in src/ and data/ are executable too. It would save some hassle for the Debian maintainer if these files could be reset to 0644 as normal. This version cannot be uploaded to Debian yet anyway - gtk+2.0 2.14 isn't available in unstable due to the Lenny freeze (2.14 is in experimental).

  2. Neil Williams

    Further, there appears to be a problem with the two methods of encryption - crytpui is not available, gpgme should be used instead. However, the pkg-check-modules line (which appears to be new in 0.5) prevents ./autogen.sh getting as far as even looking for gpgme. It looks to me like --enable-encryption needs to be split into --enable-cryptui and --enable-gpgme (these can be mutually exclusive if you want). Otherwise, encryption would simply have to be completely disabled for 0.5.

    1. Philip Withnall Post author

      There aren't "two methods of encryption". libcryptui is (as its name suggests) used for encryption widgets (specifically, the encryption key selector), while gpgme is used for the encryption process itself. Both are required if encryption is to be enabled.
      libcryptui is provided by Seahorse.

  3. Neil Williams

    In which case, something is wrong with the check because I use seahorse but the build for 0.5 still failed, looking for cryptui via pkg-config. seahorse 2.22.3-2 does not provide any pkg-config data - does the prog need a later version?
    checking for ENCRYPTION... configure: error: Package requirements (cryptui-0.0).
    There's no mention of cryptui in the configure.ac of v0.4. (Feel free to file a bug in seahorse - and gpgme - upstreams asking for pkg-config support!) 🙂

    1. Philip Withnall Post author

      On Ubuntu at least, there is a libcryptui0 package. libcryptui is part of the Seahorse SVN, and even in the 2.22 branch there is a pkgconfig file in SVN: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/seahorse/branches/gnome-2-22/libcryptui/

      Are you sure you've got the appropriate seahorse package installed (perhaps libcryptui0, if you're on Ubuntu or Debian)?

      There's no mention of cryptui in version 0.4's configure.ac because the key selection combobox (provided by libcryptui) is new to version 0.5.

  4. Neil Williams

    That pc.in file in SVN is misleading - it is for 2.24 branch support, there is no pkg-config for libcryptui.so in the released seahorse 2.22 (either Debian or Ubuntu Intrepid). Debian is now frozen but seahorse 2.24 is not in experimental either. So, to answer my own question, yes, almanah must require seahorse >= 2.24 to build, as well as the Gtk+ version bump. libcryptui0 does not exist outside Ubuntu Jaunty - and Debian is currently frozen.

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